Just published. Definite gender and women's history angles here. (Apologies for
cross-posting.)
Helen Chambers
Peter James Bowman, The Fortune Hunter: A German Prince in Regency England
(London: Signal Books, 2010)
Synopsis
The two decades after Waterloo marked the great age of foreign fortune hunters
in England. Each year brought a new influx of impecunious Continental noblemen
to the world’s richest country, and the more brides they carried off, the more
alarmed society became.
The most colourful of these men was Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau
(1785-1871), remembered today as Germany’s finest landscape gardener. In the
mid-1820s, however, his efforts to turn his estate into a magnificent park came
close to bankrupting him. To save his legacy his wife Lucie devised an unusual
plan: they would divorce so that Pückler could marry an heiress who would
finance further landscaping and, after a decent interval, be cajoled into
accepting Lucie’s continued residence. In September 1826, his marriage
dissolved, Pückler set off for London.
Drawing on the daily letters sent from England to his ex-wife and other
manuscript sources in the Pückler Archive in Brandenburg, Peter James Bowman
gives blow-by-blow accounts of Pückler’s courtships with the daughters of a
physician, an admiral, a Scottish baronet, an East India Company stockholder
and a retail jeweller. The story is enriched with details of his social life
among the resident diplomats, his gambling and money troubles, his love affairs
with a French seamstress and a German opera singer, and the hours he spent with
the capital’s prostitutes.
Pückler is the most intelligent of the overseas visitors who noted their
impressions of Regency England. His matrimonial quest brings him into contact
with such luminaries as Walter Scott, George Canning, Princess Lieven, Nathan
Mayer Rothschild, Beau Brummell and John Nash. The object of many rumours and
caricatures, the prince sticks doggedly to his task for nearly two years. And
just when it seems that he has failed, England fills his coffers in the most
unexpected way, and in doing so launches him on a new career.
In telling the story of Pückler’s adventures in the context of the trend for
Anglo-European marriages based on the exchange of a title for money, The
Fortune Hunter writes a new chapter in the history of England’s relationship
with its Continental neighbours.
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